Lessons in waste management, from Ontario’s auditor

Ontario’s politicians should take a page from the Auditor General’s report, and pare the waste.

At a time when Premier Dalton McGuinty and Ontario politicians generally are preaching austerity, it’s a bit rich to learn that the government is wasting $1.4 billion in uncollected taxes and spending millions more on inflated programs.

In his annual report Ontario Auditor General Jim McCarter used a razor-edged pencil to target not only tax waste but also ballooning expenditures like the little-used PRESTO commuter cards, whose cost nearly tripled to $700 million.

It all sounds like eHealth redux. As the government struggles to manage a $14.4 billion deficit, it’s time to make use of the auditor’s sharp and apolitical eye. With the Liberals now promising to take Ontario in a sensible economic direction, McCarter’s report provides the road map.

“This report comes at a time when the industrialized world is struggling with the twin challenges of an economic slowdown and high debt, issues that also confront Ontario,” McCarter said as he released his latest findings on Wednesday. “We paid particular attention to areas where efficiencies and cost savings in government operations may be possible.”

McCarter said the finance ministry’s collection branch (which lost staff when Ottawa took over the Corporations Tax and Retail Sales Tax in 2009) is so slow and ineffective that it had to write off $1.4 billion of the $2.4 billion in unpaid taxes it was supposed to collect. The loss of so much money is almost unfathomable — especially when kids are being shut out of schools because of rotating teachers’ strikes over the government’s new hard line on labour costs.

The report also criticized Ontario’s justice system, saying its ballooning staff numbers — including the Ontario Provincial Police, Crown attorneys and workers in secure youth facilities — run counter to the declining crime rates in a rapidly aging society.

In fact, McCarter says the OPP is refusing to use a new computer system to determine how and where officers are deployed. By sticking with its outdated 30-year-old model, the OPP calculated it needs another 500 officers. The new system shows it needs 50 fewer.

Changing times should provoke creative reflection. If the geriatric set isn’t holding up beer store monopolies, why must we constantly hire more police officers? If billions of dollars in unpaid taxes are owed, why not track them down?

Instead of merely musing about deficit cutting, the Ontario government should start thinking like the man with the sharp pencil.

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